[Closed] FrameMaker 7.x/8 Feature Requests

Ability to conditionalize the built-in graphics created from the FM toolbar, such as rounded rectangle.

What I'd *really* like is the ability to create conditional callouts where the text box and surrounding rectangle shrink or grow according to the amount of text content, but...

at least I'd like to be able to show/hide a particular callout, including its surrounding rectangle/circle and its arrows.

My suggestions would be:

1. Allow sideheads to be turned on or off in master pages. That way you can use some pages with side heads, and some not in the same document.

2. Be able to use the "TAB" key to create new rows in tables. This is a useful feature in Word, and it saves time instead of using the mouse to add a new row.

3. Screen refreshes: Scrap CTRL+L (or at least, don't make it so necessary), and make the program refresh automatically and often.

4. Ditto on all font resolution problems, and finding fonts that are hidden in the document. I'd love it if the error message would say, "you have fonts in this document that aren't in your font folders. Want us to replace them and change all instances of them so this message won't bother you again?"

5. A better Forums page. This blog is lousy, and hard to navigate. Surely Adobe is capable of making one easier to navigate!

The ability to use Edit> Undo multiple times. I am always frustrated by the fact that FrameMaker will only allow Edit> Undo one time. This would be a great enhancement to the product!

I have several requests in no particular order:

1. The ability to have paragraph tags inhirit settings of another paragraph tag. Example if one paragraph tag defines the font, and another paragraph tag inhirit settings from this tag, and do not overwrite the font, it would use the font information from the other tag.

2. It would be great if FrameMaker could be based on the same typography engine as InDesign, especially the multi-line composer.

3. It should be possible to jump to a tab outside of the right indent, so that an entry with several lines in a TOC, would not be below the page number, but would linebreak half an inch before.

4. It should be possible to tell a variable on a masterpage, to look from the bottom of the page, so that it would be possible to show in the header or footer, that this page includes index-entries from a-b, and next page from b-e and so on.

5. Ability for several people at once to be able to open a book file. The first user as administrator that can change the file, the rest with read only access, but they should still get the easy access to all the files in the book (which might not necesary be able to be opened by more than one person at a time).

Regards,

Søren Theilgaard

Lets hope that we can get two very valuable things next time.
1. Two different hyphens, one to show an automatic hyphenation and one to show a real hyphen.
2. A justified forced return.

Hope is the last thing to give up when dealing with Frame.

JW

Oof! -- I just checked all 240 posts to make sure I wasn't submitting a duplicate.

I'd like FrameMaker to include a more powerful Replace capability. While FrameMaker's ability to locate text using regular expressions is good (or at least good enough), FrameMaker doesn't allow equally intelligent replacement of text based on regular expressions.

For example, using FrameMaker's existing regular expression support to Find lines that begin with lower case characters is relatively easy using "^[a-z]", Replacing that text with "^[A-Z]" doesn't work. Similarly, Finding an end-of-line or text-flow that doesn't have a terminating period is relatively easy; programmatically using Replace to add those missing periods only when necessary is not.

I import a lot of poorly formatted content into FrameMaker. At present I'm using jEdit (www.jedit.org) to perform plain-text-level cleanup of the sorts of textual irregularities I listed above. Perhaps I'm unique in my need, but I think it would be nice if FrameMaker provided me with "native" (i.e., .fm rather than .mif file) support for regular expression manipulation / replacement of text.

(By the by, I've seen references to FrameScript and Funduc's Search / Replace tool -- If anyone can comment on how well either of these perform complex text replacements in FrameMaker native-mode files, please e-mail me directly...)

Please add a keyboard abbreviation (such as ALT-f and ALT-r, or the like) to the Find/Replace dialog box so that text can be entered into the text entry areas without mousing or repetitive TAB keystrokes.

Cheers & thanks,
Riley
x8252

Add to wish list:

More building blocks!

Having a <$spantext[CharFormat]> building block would be great for xrefs! Apply a char style to any text in a document and be able to xref it by text!

Or, if that's too much, how about a <$markertext> building block that pulls in the text of a marker for Cross-Ref markers?

Basically, an alternative to <$paratext>.

I can see these as being very useful. :-)

My apologies if this has already been submitted.

I'd like *very* much if, when Save'ing As a non-native file format (such as Microsoft Word) that FrameMaker automatically change the filename extension as necessary. Or at least that FrameMaker *not* overwrite the ".fm" file with, for example, a Word-formatted file...

I know enough to make the change 99% of the time, but it's that 1% that just ticks me off...

> Key combinations for paragraph styles ...
F9 and as many letters as you need to identify the style (watch the status bar); ditto with F8 for character styles. Up- and down-arrow keys work too; so (typically) I'll hit F9 and type :h2 for the first level-two heading, then down-arrow for :h2b

AFAIK, this works on a Mac as well as a W*ws PC.